Synthesis and Electrochemical Evaluation of Perovskite related oxide for Active Cathode for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs)

Abstract: Solid oxide fuel cells are used as stationary power plants for electricity production. Despite having a very high efficiency of 90% they haven’t gained a world-wide commercial usage, due to their very high operating temperatures, and high production cost. However, there is a lot of ongoing research with the aim of developing intermediate-temperature solid oxide fuel cells (IT-SOFCs) that could operate at temperatures below 800°C. Cathodes are the most studied components of IT-SOFCs, since decreasing operating temperature results in slow oxygen reduction reaction(ORR) kinetics and large polarization losses. Perovskite related metal oxides have become very popular materials that could make suitable cathodes for IT-SOFCs. In this work an evaluation of several materials belonging to three different material groups have been studied: single layer perovskites, with a general formula of ABO3, double layer perovskites, with a general formula of AA’B2O6 and Ruddlesden-Popper phase, with a general formula of An+1BnO3n+1. Power generating capabilities of those materials have been studied on an electrolyte supported cell, cathode/LSGM9182/Ni-Fe. IR drop and overpotential of the cathode was measured and activation energy of the ORR for each material has been calculated. The double layer perovskite cobaltites offer a significant drop in overpotential, increase in conductivity compared to their single layer counterpart, while being able to generate significant amount of power. Ruddlesden-Popper phase materials offer the lowest activation energy values amongst the researched materials, but offer limited power generation values in the setup they were tested. Both of double layer perovskites and Ruddlesden-Popper based materials have opportunities for their performance to be improved.